


play your part

by alderations



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Board Games, F/F, Fluff, Ivy Kicks Ass at Space Scrabble, Kissing, Light Angst, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Polyamory, emotions are hard to deal with after yeeting yourself into the void of space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26129263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: Nastya scowls. “Nothing. Nothing is up. I can usually go for months without seeing any of you, and I don’t see how this is any different.”“Usually, you’re somewhere in the engines or the vents or the like. When Aurora told me you were in your room”—damn traitor—“I was more concerned. Would you like to come play Space Scrabble with Raphaella and I?”“You always win space Scrabble,” grumbles Nastya.(Mechs Femslash Week Day 3 - Family)
Relationships: Ivy Alexandria/Raphaella la Cognizi/Nastya Rasputina, background Nastya/Aurora - Relationship
Comments: 10
Kudos: 74
Collections: Mechanisms Femslash Week 2020





	play your part

Nastya has been back for two years, the first time she actively thinks  _ fuck, I miss Carmilla. _

The thought makes her chest seize and her eyes water, but she tries to keep the reaction to herself, tries not to let Aurora know that her heart is racing and her throat is stuck, even though their emotions run together in one electrical tide. The crew are easier to trick. She’s been colder, more withdrawn, since she came back from outer space, so none of them are surprised when she goes missing for a few days to deal with the internal tumult of  _ everything would be fine if Carmilla came back. _

That’s not true. She knows it’s not true. Who knows what Carmilla would do if she saw that they had two—no, three—entirely new crew members? Loath as she is to admit it, Nastya loves them: talking about machinery and violins with Marius for hours, being enveloped by Raphaella’s wings every time the scientist senses that she needs to be held, and especially the unspoken bond that she shares with Lyf. The sheer isolation of empty space, when  _ chosen,  _ is something they’ll never recover from. Of course Carmilla wouldn’t be happy about the three of them. Or maybe she would, Nastya never claimed to understand her motivations.

It’s Ivy who finds her, after three days of moping in her room, because she doesn’t even want to subject Aurora to more of her angst than is strictly necessary. The knock on her door is almost soft enough to ignore, but when Nastya doesn’t respond, Ivy just keeps getting louder and louder until she gets up out of frustration and goes to tell her off. “What do you want?” she snaps, looming over the archivist after the door slides open between them.

“Given the ninety-seven percent chance that you haven’t left this room in three days,” Ivy starts, “I would like to check on you, ideally. What’s up?”

Nastya scowls. “Nothing. Nothing is  _ up.  _ I can usually go for months without seeing any of you, and I don’t see how this is any different.”

“Usually, you’re somewhere in the engines or the vents or the like. When Aurora told me you were in your room”—damn traitor—“I was more concerned. Would you like to come play Space Scrabble with Raphaella and I?”

“You always win space Scrabble,” grumbles Nastya.

Ivy rolls her eyes, but she’s already ushering Nastya out of her room, because if she’d  _ really  _ lost the argument Nastya would’ve just slammed the door in her face. “I’ll let you two play as a team. Raphaella knows plenty of good biochemical names.”

Despite her trepidation, Nastya doesn’t fight as Ivy interlaces their fingers and starts pulling her down the hallway from her pod back to the core of the ship. A few lights flicker, but she reaches out to pat the wall with one hand, assuring Aurora that she’s alright. “Why do you care if I lock myself in my room?” she asks after a minute, voice low.

“Contrary to popular belief,” Ivy sighs, “most of us on this ship do, in fact, care about each other. Sometimes people  _ act  _ on that kind of feeling.”

Nastya knows she’s not trying to be passive aggressive. Ivy’s generally too straightforward to even think of such a thing, but Nastya can’t help but remember… before. Before she went out. Before she left them all to their own devices, to careen around the universe at Aurora’s grieving whims. She and Ivy had something between them, which often involved Raphaella and usually Aurora as well, and it had made her genuinely happy. But she left, and she returned  _ different,  _ and as far as she could tell, the others weren’t all that interested in getting to know this new, damaged Nastya.

The fingers gently squeezing hers say otherwise, but she ignores that datum in favor of others that support her train of thought. “Where are we going?”

“Game room. We  _ have  _ the fancy space Scrabble set, so we may as well use it.”

That’s fair. They step through the door into the main body of Aurora, both shuddering at the sudden absence of gravity, and then Ivy tugs her away before she can get cold feet and rush back to her room. “The Toy Soldier made tea,” she comments, finally looking up at Nastya’s face to gauge her reaction. “It worries, too.”

“How many of you were involved in this conference about my emotions?”

Ivy raises her eyebrows and fixes Nastya with a flat look. “We didn’t need to have a conference. The ship just stopped lighting random sections, and we’ve been floating in one spot this entire time. The chance that you would let her go out of repair is infinitesimal, so therefore your emotions were the most likely cause.”

“Hmph.” They’ve arrived at the game room, so Nastya doesn’t bother arguing any further. As much as she wants to blame Aurora for exposing her mental state to the rest of the crew, it’s already unfair enough that Aurora should have to  _ feel  _ all of it. Nastya only has herself to blame. “Evening, la Cognizi.”

“It’s ten in the morning,” Raphaella chirps from the far side of the room, where she’s affixing the space Scrabble board to a table with an unnecessarily large power drill. “I’m glad to see you, though.”

Ivy plucks a pair of covered mugs out of the air, handing one to Nastya and poking a straw into the other. “Still hot,” she warns before Nastya can burn herself.

“I like it that way.” Of course, that being said, Nastya takes a sip and grimaces as soon as it hits her tongue. She won’t admit that she wasn’t accounting for the Toy Soldier’s preferred boiling temperature, which she’s fairly sure breaks a few laws of physics. “How many rounds of this game do I have to play before you two leave me alone?”

Raphaella and Ivy look at each other for a long second, having some kind of conversation with their eyebrows that makes Nastya want to sulk even more. “That’s for us to decide,” Raphaella says at last. “Come on, I think I’ve got the pieces sorted out.”

The board is fixed to the table forever, apparently, but the magnetic tiles move easily enough with a bit of pressure, so Nastya takes the time to rearrange hers alphabetically as she wedges her legs under the table so she won’t float away. Ivy sits down next to her, Raph on the other side, and she pointedly ignores the tip of a wing skating over her shoulder. “Would you like to go first, Your Grace?”

“That’s the wrong title and you know it,” Nastya mumbles, even though she’s more bothered by being referred to as royalty at all.

“I think the person to the left of the dealer starts,” Ivy cuts in.

All three of them look around for a moment, because left and right are inconsequential details in the span of an immortal life. “That’s still Nastya.”

“Fine.” Once her tiles are in order, Nastya examines the board and starts arranging them into something that won’t give Ivy too many opportunities. She finds that a defensive playing style is the only way to handle a mechanised librarian. It takes longer to spell out a word when she has to pry up each magnet individually, but Ivy and Raphaella don’t comment on the precision with which she arranges the tiles. At least in zero-gravity Scrabble, she doesn’t have to deal with them getting crooked every time someone  _ breathes.  _ “Ivy’s turn, then.”

They play a few rounds, Nastya and Raphaella conferring about every option while Ivy slowly sets up the board for some event horizon that they’re not prepared to handle yet. She doesn’t want to admit it, but Nastya feels a bit of the ache in her chest lifting as she drifts closer to Raphaella and, eventually, ducks under her wing to whisper out of Ivy’s line of sight. Whether she’s just getting out of her head or being extraordinarily gay, she’s not sure. Regardless, she’s thinking about  _ something  _ other than Carmilla and all the related guilt, so she will (begrudgingly) take it.

“Parasaurolophus,” she declares on the tenth round, placing the final tile with a decisive  _ clack.  _ “Try me, Alexandria. Just fucking  _ try.” _

Ivy’s smile is a rare, almost deranged thing, and Nastya shifts even closer to Raphaella as she braces herself for the response. “Impressive. You’ll have to give me a moment, but I  _ believe…  _ yes, this ought to do it.”

By the time Ivy is done rearranging tiles, the board in front of her reads  _ QUIXOTRY.  _ “That can’t be a word,” Nastya mutters.

“English is an outrageous language,” Raphaella responds. “Still, our word was twice as long! There’s no way—”

“Parasaurolophus is worth twenty points. Quixotry,” Ivy announces, _ “would _ be worth twenty-seven, if it weren’t on a triple word square,  _ and  _ I get an extra fifty points for using all of my tiles at once. So that brings me to one hundred and thirty-one points, and since I was already three hundred points ahead of you both, I win. Clearly.”

Nastya and Raphaella stare in disbelief. “I really thought we had her this time,” Raph confides, shaking her head.

“Were  _ you  _ keeping score?” asks Nastya.

“No, I thought  _ you  _ were.”

Ivy giggles, apparently oblivious to the way Nastya and Raphaella are both watching her like she’s a particularly cute kitten murdering something even cuter. “It was a valiant effort,” she admits, scooting closer to Nastya’s side and smiling when Raphaella’s wing extends to draw her into the half-hug. “Especially since you’ve been unwell, Nastya. I admire your resilience.”

“Not that it did me any good,” Nastya deflects, even as she leans into Ivy’s shoulder and delights in the scent of old books. “I think we ought to have a head start.”

Tipping her head to one side, Raphaella pretends to consider, though she’s mostly just moving closer to Nastya. “We could blindfold her next time?”

Ivy blushes. “That’s just—that would make it impossible to play!”

“It’s the only way we could win,” Nastya responds. “Unless…”

“Unless…?” Raphaella’s wing flutters against the back of Nastya’s head.

The look on Ivy’s face is halfway between morbid curiosity and reasonable fear. “I don’t know if I like where this is going,” she muses.

“If she was properly distracted,” says Nastya, “maybe we’d have a chance.”

“Distracted how?” Another flurry of metallic feathers, and Nastya’s properly boxed in between the two of them, with Raphaella’s arm propped behind her back and Ivy’s hip squished up against hers.

Her own boldness startles her all of a sudden, but it’s hard to imagine that Ivy won’t be receptive given, well, everything about the situation. “Like this.”

Nastya tips her head up and holds Ivy’s chin in place with one hand, encouraged by the way the archivist shivers under her cool fingers. When she kisses her, Ivy’s lips part on a sigh. “Certainly looks distracted to me,” Raphaella remarks from behind them.

“Hmm. I didn’t ask for your scientific observations.” Nastya turns away from Ivy and pulls Raph in, pouring all of her gratitude for the gentle touches and protective wing-hugs into the kiss. “That’s more like it.”

When she’s more aware of herself again, both Ivy and Raphaella are watching her with a hunger that Nastya hasn’t seen from other humans in a  _ very  _ long time. The moment stretches on, all three looking from one to another as if hesitant to break the tension, before Ivy rests her chin on Nastya’s shoulder and kisses her neck. “So, do I win anything, or are my victories just symbolic at this point?”

Nastya has a feeling that this is going to be a fun night.

**Author's Note:**

> hello hello I had a plan for this but by the time I sat down to actually write it I forgot that plan, and then I found out that there is an actual magnetic space scrabble set for astronauts and I had to write about it. I've never actually put in the work to write zero-g Aurora before, because I forget every 30 seconds and start describing footsteps or some shit, but it was WORTH IT this time.
> 
> I just *clears throat* *taps mic* think Nastya should have more girlfriends. And that the urge to isolate herself post-un-Out is very strong, especially given how much guilt she likely feels about so many things, but that's what that good sweet found family is for!! To force you to get your ass kicked at space scrabble!!
> 
> anyway. I didn't even read over this, cuz I'm writing like 3 things at once, and it'll be a miracle if I managed to actually keep the google docs in the right places and not accidentally put snippets of them in each other. So if it makes no sense, I'm sorry. I hope you enjoyed & pls comment to feed me one (1) emotional Lima bean, which is my favorite food and therefore a good thing and not a punishment. Though if you'd rather feed me emotional broccoli and make me suffer, well, that's your prerogative.
> 
> OHOHO I JUST REALIZED THE ANGSTIER DAYS ARE COMING UP >:3c see you all tomorrow goodbye sleep tight


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